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You’d think we’d have been exhausted, ready to tumble into bed after so much drudgery, but we weren’t. For me, staring at those two dials all day, every day created a pent-up energy, like static electricity. The tedium was exhausting, but at the end of my shift, something in me would wake up, and I’d be ready to stay up half the night. And thousands of other pent-up young people were happy to stay up with me.
The Central Rec Hall was near the middle of what was called Townsite — Jackson Square now, a couple of blocks below Chapel on the Hill. There must have been a dozen or so dormitories within a few blocks of the rec hall, and each dorm housed hundreds of young men and women, most of them single. So the rec hall was jammed every night, all night. Right around midnight, about the time the day-shift workers would start running out of steam, the people who worked evening shift would clock out and come pouring into the rec hall and stay till dawn, and just as they were staggering off to catch some sleep, the graveyard-shift workers would come in. On weekends, the dance floor would be so crowded you could barely move.
One night in the spring of 1944, my roommate Roxanne and I walked in figuring we’d do a little jitterbugging to Glenn Miller records, but instead, there was a guy singing and playing the piano. He looked sophisticated and older — twenty-five, maybe all of thirty; can you believe that? These days Oak Ridge is full of fossils like me, but back then, nearly everybody here was under thirty. Construction workers had to be young and strong to do the manual labor, and scientists had to be young and mentally agile to do the mental gymnastics. I was twenty; most of the girls I worked with had just graduated from high school.
Roxanne and I worked our way up to the front of the room, but it took a while, because we had to wiggle between scores of men to get up there, and the men didn’t want to make it too easy for us to get past them. Oak Ridge in the early forties was like a Gold Rush boomtown back in the 1800s; there were fifteen or twenty men to every woman in Oak Ridge during the war, so it was always easy to get dates — some gals would double-or triple-book, starting one date at eight, another at ten, and another at midnight. But the sad truth was, what Oak Ridge had in quantity, it lacked in quality. Lots of the men were just dumb louts — fine if you wanted to dig a foundation, bulldoze a road, or tangle in a darkened doorway, but if you were looking for more, the wheat-to-chaff ratio was about as low as the ratio of U-235 to U-238.
Up close the guy at the piano looked kind of fancy. He was wearing a coat and tie, he had round, horn-rimmed glasses and wavy, combed-back hair. He looked brainy and the music he was playing went along with the look — Cole Porter. Porter’s lyrics are clever and suggestive, and you could tell by the singer’s inflections and eyebrow wiggles that he knew what all the double-entendres meant. But underneath the glitter, Porter was deeply cynical — like a cocktail party that sounds fun until you really listen, and then you start to hear the anger and desperation lurking beneath the laughter and clinking ice cubes. After half a dozen songs of sparkling, witty cynicism I was beginning to lose interest, but then he launched into something soft and mournful. The crowd’s chatter had gotten a little louder as the set stretched on, and the first few bars of the piano were drowned out, but pretty soon everybody shut up. I’m not exaggerating, you could hear people near the back of the room shushing folks behind them so they could hear the song, a wistful number about romantic disillusionment called “Love for Sale.”
I looked at Roxanne, and the look in her eyes was the same bittersweet look I felt in mine as he sang it. I looked back at the singer, and suddenly his gaze locked on me, another pair of eyes that had already seen a lifetime worth of loss. “Old love, new love, every love but true love.” By the time he got to the end he was almost whispering, and he finished the song with a soft piano flourish that drifted up into the rafters like cigarette smoke. Before the notes had completely died away, he’d risen from the bench, stepped out of the circle of light, and disappeared into the mass of bodies.
The room was silent for a moment, then the crowd cheered and whistled and called for more. He did not reappear, and after several moments the PA system offered us consolation in the melodious form of the Andrews Sisters. A strapping young man in a corporal’s uniform asked me to dance, and I obliged. He leered at me, to make sure I knew that he — like the Andrews Sisters — was in the mood. “Man, those gals sure can sing it,” he said.
“They’re fine,” I said, “but that guy at the piano — he was really something. I wonder if he’s on a USO tour.”
“Him?” The corporal looked at me like I was an idiot. “Nah, that guy works here. He’s one of the eggheads. Chemist or something.”
Just then — at least, this is the way I like to remember the timing — I saw a long finger tap the corporal on the shoulder. “Mind if I cut in?” It was him: the singer; he was talking to the soldier, but he was smiling at me. The corporal looked annoyed but also embarrassed, as if he thought the guy had heard himself called an egghead, or as if the corporal had called down this punishment on himself by being an unappreciative listener.
We danced just that one dance, then he asked if he could walk me back to my dorm. The walk was only two blocks, but that was enough to decide things for me. The corporal was right about one thing, Novak was a scientst. But he was wrong about the other — Novak wasn’t an egghead; he was funny and self-deprecating, and an odd mixture of confidence and humility. He was a prodigy, with Ph.D.’s in both chemistry and physics, but he was surprisingly humble. I thought I had hit the jackpot, Bill.
We got married six weeks later, in the Chapel on the Hill. He and I exchanged vows in the very same spot where you and I saw his ashes yesterday.
I moved from the dorm to the house on the ridge that Novak was entitled to, as a senior scientist. “Snob Hill,” everyone called it, even those of us lucky enough to live on it, because we knew we didn’t necessarily deserve to live so much better than the people down in the valley. The difference between the ridge and the valley was amazing — down among the dormitories, trailers, and hutments, there were no trees and very little grass. During wet weather, the valley floor was a sea of mud — cars would get stuck up to their axles, and if you had to walk somewhere that didn’t have a raised boardwalk, you’d sink so deep your shoes would get sucked right off your feet. During hot, dry spells, it was like living in the Dust Bowl — dust got into every nook and cranny, you’d choke if you didn’t breathe through a handkerchief, and your face would be caked with red dust and streaks of sweat. Up on Snob Hill the roads were good, the yards were nice, and crime was virtually nonexistent.
Happily ever after, right?
Except that it wasn’t.
But that’s another story, Bill. Another story for another day.
CHAPTER 15
Beatrice deflected all my follow-up questions about Novak. “I’m tired,” she said. “It’s too sad to talk about right now.” And then she added, “Tell me your name again?” The sudden, vague hint of senility might just be a ploy, I realized, but if I backed her into that corner, she might never come out of it again. Given that Emert and Thornton had both struck out with her, I decided a strategic retreat was in order.
I checked my unreliable wristwatch. “I’ve probably overstayed my welcome,” I said, “and I’d better be getting back to the university. It was so nice talking with you, Beatrice. You reckon I could come visit you again?”
She eyed me sharply, as if to size up my intentions or assess my sincerity. I smiled at her then, and it was a genuine smile — she really was a remarkable woman — and the smile seemed to tip the scales in my favor. “Of course, Bill,” she said, “if you can tear yourself away from those comely UT coeds long enough to listen to an old woman rattle.”
I held out my hand to shake goodbye but she ignored it, leaning a cheek toward me for a kiss. I brushed the pebbled skin lightly with my lips. She smelled of face powder and perfume and vodka, and I briefly imagined a different Beatrice, a young and beautiful Beatrice, offering her cheek
or her lips to a soldier or a scientist. She would have been an irresistible force.
I was halfway back to UT when my cell phone rang. The display read THOMPSON PHOTO. It was Rodney Satterfield, and I hoped he had good news about the film from Novak’s freezer. “So,” I said, “what did you find on the world’s oldest undeveloped film? Girlie pictures of some cute young calutron operator, circa 1944?” As soon as I heard myself make the joke, two images of Beatrice — young Beatrice and old Beatrice — popped into my head, and I felt doubly embarrassed.
“Actually,” he said, “we didn’t find much of anything. A clear strip of film. Looks kinda like it hasn’t been exposed. Back before everything went digital, we used to get two or three unexposed rolls a week. Somebody would load the film, then put the camera away without using it. Six months later, when they got the camera out to use it, they couldn’t remember whether it was a new roll or a shot roll. So they’d rewind the blank film and bring it to us to develop. And then they’d be pissed off at us because there weren’t any pictures.”
“Oh well,” I said, “it’s not like there was a note taped to the package saying, ‘develop this if you want to see who killed me.’ We just thought it was worth checking, since he’d gone to the trouble to wrap it up and keep it in the freezer all those years. Anyhow, thanks for trying. I’ll need to take the film back to the police, just so they’ve got custody of it, even though it doesn’t do them any good. I’m on my way to UT now; how about I swing by and pick it up on my way?”
“Actually, I said it looked like it hadn’t been shot,” Rodney corrected. “But it had. The images are just really faint. Either it’s horribly underexposed, or the film’s been faded by radiation.”
“You mean because the guy whose freezer it was in was a walking radiographic camera?”
“Well, maybe,” he said. “Or maybe just decades of background solar radiation. Over time, solar radiation can dissipate the images, even if the film is stashed in a freezer. I tried overprocessing it — letting the film soak in the chemicals about fifty percent longer, which usually helps with old film. Doesn’t seem to have made much difference. But I’m not quite ready to give up on this,” he said. “Mind you, the prints might not turn out black-and-white; they might turn out black-and-black. But it can’t hurt to try. How far away are you?”
“I’m nearly to I-40,” I said. “Ten minutes? Maybe twenty.”
“You want to go in the darkroom with me? If you’ve got time, I’ll wait till you get here.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of Thompson Photo Products. Rodney met me at the counter and led me to a darkroom at the back of the building. I felt privileged; although I’d brought hundreds of rolls of crime-scene photos here over the years, I’d never before been ushered into the inner sanctum, the darkroom.
The film, cut into several one-foot strips, was hanging from the photographic equivalent of a clothesline. Rodney unclipped one of the strips and held it so I could see through it. The darkroom was lit by a single red bulb, so — not surprisingly — the room was…dark. Still, despite the dimness, I could see that the cause looked hopeless.
“You weren’t kidding,” I said. “It’s like variations on a theme of clear. Clear, clearer, clearest. How do you know where to even begin? Which one’s the least bad?”
“I looked at them again on a light box after we talked,” he said. “I had to put a few layers of paper over the glass to dim the light, just so it wouldn’t blow everything out completely. But once I got it dimmed down, I could see a little more — not much, but enough to tell that several of them seemed to have a similar smudge of image at the center. This one right here”—he pointed to the middle of the strip—“seems about a millionth of a percent less horrible than the others.”
“That good, huh?” He nodded glumly. “Well, if it takes any of the pressure off you, the bar of my expectation is about six feet under, so there’s no way it can be worse than I’m expecting.”
Rodney laid the film on the stage of an enlarger — a downward-pointing rig labeled BESELER that looked like a cross between an industrial lamp and an old-fashioned bellows-type camera — and slipped the film between the lamp and the lens. Then he took a sheet of 8-by-10 photo paper from a metal box and clipped it to an easel at the enlarger’s base. “I’m guessing at this,” he said, “but we need as little light going through this as I can get, so I’ve stopped the lens down all the way. Oh, and I’ve got a number-five contrast filter in there to pump up any trace of contrast we’re lucky enough to have.” He flipped a switch, and light streamed downward out of the lens and through the film, illuminating the white, empty rectangle of paper. Let there be light, I thought, Novak’s funeral hymn echoing in my head.
The light clicked off after only a few seconds, leaving me blind for a moment — and leaving a reverse image on my retinas, a black 8-by-10-inch rectangle floating on a white background — until my eyes readjusted to the red safelight.
“Damn,” I said. The paper was blank.
“Hang on,” said Rodney. “You’ll probably want to say that again in a minute, but we’re not done yet. The image doesn’t show up until we put the paper in the developer.” He pointed to a shallow metal tray that contained an inch or so of clear liquid. “Faint as that image was, this’ll probably develop pretty quickly, if there’s anything there. Then I’ll need to hustle it into the stop bath, to fix it.”
Funny, I thought: a week ago — a moment before events in the morgue took their dramatic turn — Miranda had been preparing to fix Leonard’s brain. Now Rodney was talking of fixing this ghostly image Novak had left behind.
Removing the paper from the base of the enlarger, he laid it gently in the tray.
I leaned close. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hope for anything, but I did.
Ten seconds passed, and the paper remained blank. After another ten, an image began to materialize, like something slowly emerging from a dense fog.
By the time thirty seconds had elapsed, I could tell what that something was. A young man — a young soldier — emerged from the mists of time onto the page. He lay in a shallow, fresh depression in the earth. His head was turned slightly, and I saw a dark circle at his right temple. I had a guess what the dark circle was, although I couldn’t be sure.
One thing was unmistakable, though. The open, staring eyes were those of a dead man.
PART TWO
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
— Robert Oppenheimer, quoting Hindu scripture after the Trinity atomic test, July 16, 1945
Now we’re all sons of bitches.
— Ken Bainbridge, Trinity test director
CHAPTER 16
Crossing the Solway Bridge over the clinch River, I left behind the Solway community’s half-mile strip of convenience marts and auto-repair shops and barren produce stands. The bridge marked a border, a boundary: once my wheels were on the other side, I had crossed over, into the land General Leslie Groves had claimed for the Manhattan Project—59,000 acres, bounded on three sides by the Clinch, on the fourth side by Black Oak Ridge, and in every direction by the peculiar sensation that World War II still lived on, somehow, in this East Tennessee wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Although the security checkpoints at Solway and the handful of other entry points to Oak Ridge had long since been dismantled, much of the site looked just as it had during the war, and it was perhaps only natural that the city and its people tended to dwell in the black-and-white importance of the past.
On a whim, I varied my route into Oak Ridge this time, taking the exit ramp marked BETHEL VALLEY ROAD, which led to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 Plant. Bearing right at a fork in the road, I bore right onto Scarboro Road. I crossed a low ridge, dropped down into Union Valley, and saw the vast Y-12 complex sprawling to my left behind a high chain-link fence. My eye was caught by a cluster of large, brooding buildings. Their stout concrete frames were filled in with red brick, and str
ips of windows had been set near the roofline to allow daylight into the cavernous interiors. From the archival photos at the library, I recognized these as the buildings where Beatrice and the other calutron girls had sifted uranium-235 from U-238 for the Hiroshima bomb.
A quarter mile later, the road cut through a gap in a low, wooded ridge, and the Y-12 Plant disappeared from view. Just beyond the gap, a blocky concrete guardhouse, its windows and gunports long since boarded up, marked what had once been one of the Secret City’s gates. Passing the guardhouse, I was leaving the federal reservation and entering the town; leaving the past and rejoining the present. Yet pulling into the police department’s parking lot behind the municipal building, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had one foot in the twenty-first century and one foot in World War II. And sometimes it was tough to tell which foot was on firmer ground.
* * *
Detective Jim Emert peered at one of the prints through a magnifying glass, then laid the lens down in exasperation. “Hell,” he said, “with all that grain in the image, magnifying it just makes it worse.”
I’d done exactly the same thing an hour before, in my office under the stadium. Magnifying the print was like enlarging a newspaper photograph into a meaningless cloud of dots. “The prints aren’t great,” I said, “but it’s amazing there’s anything there at all.” Considering how faint the images on the film had been, I wasn’t sure whether to think of the guy at Thompson’s as a darkroom tech or a psychic medium. After conjuring up that first startling image of the young soldier’s body, Rodney had spent most of that night and all of this morning experimenting with different exposure times, contrast filters, and developer baths. He’d tried burning and dodging, which sounded like an arsonist’s modus operandi, but which actually meant using masks and screens to increase or decrease the amount of light falling on different regions of the photo paper. He’d also scanned the negatives into a digital-processing computer. In short, he’d tried every trick in the book to coax every speck of image out of that ghostly film. By the time he was through, he had used a hundred sheets of photo paper…and produced a sequence of prints that hinted at a chilling story.
